The proposed study will seek environmental factors giving rise to alcohol use and misuse by Alabama public-school students. The location and context of each school in the study -- its spatial and geographic characteristics -- will be evaluated, the "why" of youth drinking being explored simultaneously with the "where." Such an integrated evaluation is called for because students spend substantial parts of many days at school. Assigning school location and community context a role in development of the study's explanatory variables should prove valuable. The explanatory variables will include environment-based protective and risk factors functioning in schools and their catchment areas. Additionally, the proposed research will isolate measures of the effects of these environment-based factors for students in Alabama's "Black Belt" and compare them to measures for students in all other Alabama counties. During the study, data will be collected or aggregated to describe each "geographic unit" -- one public school plus its catchment area, or community. Included in the data will be such measures as the geographic unit's density of alcohol-sales outlets and structural factors. The physical address of a studied school will be noted, and its sixth- through twelfth-grade students'responses on a 2002 substance-use survey will be analyzed in terms of school- and community-contextual factors and their alcohol use and alcohol misuse. The 2002 survey's target population was sixth- through twelfth-graders enrolled in spring 2002 at Alabama public schools. Using statistics-based spatial analysis, measures will be derived for the impact of environment on student drinking. Ecological theories will be applied to this data and geographic information systems (GIS) will be used to pinpoint visually those schools with markedly lower or higher risk of student alcohol use and misuse. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Alcohol use and misuse by adolescents are well associated with legal trouble, injury, and even death. Research called the "Drug Abuse Warning Network" that has monitored ER admissions and coroners'reports found almost 100,000 emergency room visits in 2004 by persons under age 21 that were attributable to problem drinking. The results of the proposed research will offer substantive policy implications both for risk reduction through relocation of alcohol outlets, and for the strengthening of protective factors via school programs encouraging pro-social engagement and resistance against peer influence.